What It Was Like at Home in the ’60s With a Radical Italian Artist

“It’s quite complex to talk about my mother in detail,” admits Beatrice Merz, the daughter of the Italian sculptor and painter Marisa Merz (who politely declines interviews and uses Beatrice as a surrogate). “I could try to sum up the environment in which I grew up, and the way she, together with my father, Mario, raised me.”

Beatrice’s parents, both artists, engaged her “in constant debate,” she says, “allowing me to experience every moment of their artistic path, taking me with them everywhere they went. They introduced me to many representatives of the art scene of their time, and this somehow implied that I had to soak in everything that happened around me. Looking back, I can describe those years as intense, but it was simply my life next to two parents who were vibrantly contributing to the events of the time.”

Half a century later, Beatrice, the founder and president of the Turin-based contemporary art center Fondazione Merz, has helped organize the first large-scale stateside retrospective of her mother’s work. “Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space,” which opens tomorrow at the Met Breuer, unites her early experimental sculptures, her subsequent quirky and carefully constructed installations and her newer, ethereal portraits. “I recently asked her how some of her works came about, what was the thought, inspiration or approach behind them,” Beatrice says. “She answered that she always and only did what she liked, and that every work originated from the pleasure of making it, from a spontaneous gesture or finding of a particular object or material.”

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“Living Sculpture” (1966).CreditSalvatore Licitra

More often than not, Beatrice actually watched the pieces take shape, as Marisa, “cutting and stapling aluminum strips together for days and days,” suspended sheet metal from the ceiling of her own kitchen. These arrangements would eventually become her “Living Sculptures” — and exemplars of the 1960s Arte Povera movement that championed “poor,” or found, materials in response to Italy’s postwar wealth. Marisa participated in the artists’ daily dialogue and collective shows, and despite her gender, “her colleagues considered her a central figure in the group and certainly not an outsider,” Beatrice explains. “I dare to say that she never really thought about being the only woman. She was conscious of her choice, which she most likely made following her own nature and inclinations.”

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Untitled (2016).CreditCourtesy of Marisa Merz

Marisa glided into other disciplines — and today, at age 90, “she pours her energy into drawing on large sheets of paper, almost as if challenging her own physicality,” Beatrice adds — but the Arte Povera mission of finding meaning in the everyday has informed the entirety of the artist’s oeuvre. “The air was filled with sensitivity,” Beatrice says of 1960s and ’70s Turin. “There was a new existential model based on a commitment to conceiving, presenting and spreading the art of one’s time; this meant breaking down the space, breaking down the object and constantly controlling each moment, for art had moved into life.” The Merzes spent those years completely enveloped. “Our homes (as shelter, resting place, emotional container) were a workplace, filled with artworks, books, objects — there were no boundaries,” Beatrice explains. “‘Home’ was also the art gallery, or the museums, the restaurants or anywhere we would stop.”

“Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space” is on view Jan. 24-May 7 at the Met Breuer, 945 Madison Ave., New York, metmuseum.org.